The Stuff of Nightmares
by Flatkatsi
Summary: Jack’s past comes back to haunt him.
1. Part One

  
  
This story is written as a series of seventeen drabbles - short fics of exactly 100 words each.

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 1  
  
He had no choice. He picked up the pistol, hands trembling slightly, not from fear he hoped, but from weakness.  
  
So tired. Days of questions, beating, starvation, darkness and then this game  
  
This evil game.  
  
He looked into their eyes and saw only hatred and a sadistic pleasure. He held the gun to his temple and gently pulled the trigger, his eyes resolutely open, watching the face of the man across from him in the tattered uniform, visibly shaking.  
  
Click.  
  
A sound empty of hope.  
  
They both knew. Only one chamber was left.  
  
One bullet.  
  
He passed the pistol over.


	2. Part Two

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 2

He couldn't remember his name.  
  
That battered and broken soul across from him, trying to look brave but only succeeding in looking young and scared.  
  
He should have known his name. Hell – he could barely remember his own  
  
He should have offered some comfort.  
  
He should have tried to stop this, but deep down inside he knew that he was just pitifully glad that it wasn't him. So he did nothing.  
  
Too late now.  
  
The sound was loud, reverberating in his head and leaving echoes that would last forever.  
  
Can images have echoes?  
  
Will he see the blood forever too? 


	3. Part Three

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 3  
  
He was made to clean up the mess. They stood and laughed as he puked what little he had in his stomach over the floor. Then they punched him until he fell, knees in the blood and vomit.  
  
He didn't want to look, but he couldn't help it, he had to.  
  
He knew that he had to remember, if not for his sake, for the sake of the dead.  
  
For the sake of all the dead that he had helped to bury in this place. He added this last lost soul to the list and remembered.  
  
He could never forget. 


	4. Part Four

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 4  
  
He got home – eventually. He didn't speak for quite a while – couldn't. But what he couldn't say out loud he dreamed.  
  
Smells. The smell of cordite.  
  
Sounds. The laughter of the guards.  
  
Images. The sightless ruin of the young man's face.  
  
Memories that had him crying out in the night when he couldn't whisper in the day.  
  
The worst memory was the feeling of sheer joy, thankfulness that it hadn't been him. He never told them how the Lieutenant had died. He kept the secret tight and hidden.  
  
Gradually he came back to himself, but part of him had been lost forever. 


	5. Part Five

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 5  
  
How many times?  
  
How many times before the terrible image was engraved permanently on his mind?  
  
At first, every time he saw it he was surprised.  
  
When he held his son for the first time in months.  
  
When he walked through the peaceful streets of home.  
  
When he looked into the faces of the fresh young soldiers, ready and anxious to fight, to do their part. Should he warn them? Should he tell them that their invincibility was just an illusion?  
  
As the years went by the image didn't grow any dimmer, if anything it became clearer  
  
It haunted him. 


	6. Part Six

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 6  
  
Waking in the night as he had done so many nights before, he breathed heavily. Bright moonlight bent around his room, bathing it in a soft grey light. He turned, crying a strangled yell of pain and terror.  
  
This time it was different.  
  
This time the nightmare didn't go away.  
  
This time the ruined face still stared down at him. The hand that had held the gun reached out to him, beseeching.  
  
He felt the cold breath upon his cheek as his memory bent and whispered softly in his ear.  
  
"Do you remember me? I need someone to remember me." 


	7. Part Seven

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 7  
  
He walked through the day unthinking, heart sore, mind in turmoil.  
  
He had promised. He had promised to remember.  
  
For the sake of the dead.  
  
And he had remembered, but he hadn't honoured. In trying so hard to forget he had forgotten why he shouldn't.  
  
He had thought that he was a man of his word. A man of principle.  
  
He wasn't.  
  
He hadn't spoken, so the part of him that had died in that place had never been reborn.  
  
Perhaps it was too late.  
  
So he walked through the day untouched by the morning light, followed by a shadow. 


	8. Part Eight

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 8

He hadn't realised how hard it would be. The pen was a heavy weight in his reluctant hand. Somehow it seemed wrong to type this on the clinical coldness of a computer keyboard.  
  
It took him hours. Then finally it was done. Down in black and white. He folded the pages precisely and tucked them into the clean white envelope.  
  
Now others would know what he had done.  
  
What he hadn't done.  
  
But the words could not convey the guilt that he had lived with these long wearying years.  
  
The guilt that ate away at him.  
  
He needed to confess. 


	9. Part Nine

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 9

  
  
He hadn't expected compassion. Condemnation maybe, but not compassion.  
  
It almost broke him. After all these years he almost wept. Only discipline held him there, rigid, standing at attention.  
  
Perhaps he hadn't understood. Didn't he realise that it was Jack's fault.  
  
Jack.  
  
Jack O'Neill.  
  
A soldier who had let a fellow soldier die in his place. Who had stood by and watched. Who had been relieved.  
  
A warrior once.  
  
Then a coward who had lived a lie for years until finally it had been exposed.  
  
He was no hero.  
  
He was a sham, a hollow shell.  
  
Didn't the General understand?


	10. Part Ten

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 10

  
  
He held the gun firmly, finger hooked around the trigger. It felt right somehow. There was none of the fear that he had felt on that hot, dirty, stinking day. None of the desperation to live.  
  
There was still the guilt.  
  
This is how it should have been, that last bullet ready. He could have turned the gun on the guards, gone down fighting. He could have turned it on himself, saved a life.  
  
But he hadn't. He had been selfish. Ever since that day he had tried to atone.  
  
Tried hard to atone by his deeds.  
  
By his life.


	11. Part Eleven

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 11  
  
  
There was something so familiar about this, sitting, gun in hand in a silent house.  
  
The last time that he had done it, he had felt that presence beside him, calling. His heart had been closed to it then. Closed to everything but grief, but he had been touched momentarily by something. It had been enough to make him hesitate, make him rethink the unthinkable.  
  
That time he had put the gun down, unused, images of other deaths too close beside him.  
  
Too much blood to see clearly.  
  
It was too easy and Jack O'Neill never took the easy road. 


	12. Part Twelve

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 12  
  
  
He looked down at his fingers with their strange bumps from so many breaks. He remembered each one.  
  
He had refused at first, refused to take the gun. They had forced his hand around it. The snap as a finger broke was so small in the larger picture that he had barely felt it. It had been only when they started on the other man that he had accepted the inevitable, holding the gun to his own head while they held the tattered figure in their grip.  
  
The other had looked on, then he had nodded his head in acceptance. 


	13. Part Thirteen

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 13  
  
  
In a blinding flash he remembered.  
  
His name had been Steven. Lieutenant Steven Bremmer.  
  
Steve.  
  
Why hadn't he remembered it before? He must have known it. Steve had shared his cell for weeks, had talked about his family, had been there when he had been brought back from interrogation...  
  
He stopped thinking and just sat, staring blankly into nothing. He did that sometimes when he remembered. It hadn't happened for a while now.  
  
He stayed silent in the darkness of his empty house. There were things that he couldn't remember.  
  
Wouldn't.  
  
The gentle breath on his cheek spoke its name. 


	14. Part Fourteen

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 14  
  
  
He stayed in the same position all night. Listening to Steve's voice in his ear.  
  
It told him what had happened.  
  
Described what he had not allowed himself to imagine in his worst nightmares.  
  
Reminded him how, just for a time, he had become less than human, less than the dogs slinking through the filth.  
  
Explained why he hadn't allowed himself to remember.  
  
What they had done.  
  
In the remembrance of the deeds done to him he had been reminded of that quiet presence that had been there through most of it.  
  
The acceptance when the pistol had been passed over.


	15. Part Fifteen

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 15  
  
  
He didn't report for duty the next day. There was no way that he could face the ordinary and mundane. He spent the day doing what he should have done years ago.  
  
He found the information easily enough, using his contacts, and then he packed a bag. A small one - he didn't intend to be gone long.  
  
His had been the last flight allowed to land. The storm blew in from the mountains, as he knocked on the small house's door.  
  
He waited for his knock to be answered, half wishing that it wouldn't be, but praying that it would. 


	16. Part Sixteen

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 16  
  
  
He had sipped his tea, tasting nothing but sorrow.  
  
Steve's mother cried when he told them why he had come, holding tight to her remaining son. He told them how Steve had been there for him, whenever they dragged him back to their cell. He told them how her son had kept him sane, talked to him and brought him back from where he had retreated to in his mind.  
  
He didn't tell them how Steve died. There was no need for them to know.  
  
He had lived with it for so long, he could carry it for a while longer. 


	17. Part Seventeen

The Stuff of Nightmares Part 17  
  
  
Refusing a ride back to the airport, he walked through the driving rain, letting it soak him. He held his head down, swallowing his emotions along with the water.  
  
Jack O'Neill didn't do emotions.  
  
He never had.  
  
Perhaps that had always been his problem, his fault.  
  
He walked through the storm, aching all over, as if he had run for miles, going nowhere.  
  
Then the wind touched him on the shoulder and cried one word "remembered" and Jack cried with it.  
  
He had remembered and he knew that he had been redeemed.  
  
He turned for home, just as the sun came out.

The End


End file.
